


Information Which May Be Of Interest To Certain Parties

by cmshaw



Category: Dragaera - Brust
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-04
Updated: 2006-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-08 07:15:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/74054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmshaw/pseuds/cmshaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would be my great honor to relate to you some facts concerning the opinions held by Lord Morrolan in regards to one Leareth, also know as Count Mellar of the Jhereg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Information Which May Be Of Interest To Certain Parties

You can find all sorts of interesting things in the Imperial Library -- some of them are even listed in the catalogue of books. This one isn't. I'm not entirely sure that it's even been written yet, to be honest with you. (I am not, I shall tell you up front, going to be honest enough with you to tell you how I know that it's going to be hidden in the stacks somewhere in the treatises on Serioli steel. I need to retain some mystery, after all.)

I don't want to prejudice your reading, which is what all of the best academics say when they don't know quite how to introduce something, but I'll remind you that you did ask about Morrolan's opinion of Leareth, also know as Count Mellar of the Jhereg:

> When Lord Morrolan and Count Mellar retired to the former's library, the book presented by the latter was positioned on a low table where they would immediately see it when they entered. Morrolan did so -- enter, and then see -- and swept over to the table to place his hand on the cover of the book. "Ah!" he said in gratified tones.
> 
> Mellar bowed low. "This is, then, the book in question?"
> 
> Morrolan took the book in his hands and made a cursory inspection to confirm what he had already apprehended. When he was done, he returned the book to the table, although one of his hands remained pressed lightly against the binding, stroking it possessively. "It is," said Morrolan, and gave a bow of his own nearly as low as Mellar's.
> 
> The Jhereg Count received this gesture from the Dragon Lord with a look of intense pleasure. "My lord," he said, "it is my honor to be of service to you." He politely did not mention the money which Morrolan would pay him for this book.
> 
> Morrolan politely refrained from mentioning this as well. He said, "In return, I will do you the honor of forgetting how I came to lose the book and merely rejoice in its return." It was an interesting statement. A certain turn of tone could easily have made it into a deadly insult, and yet Morrolan spoke it, and it appeared that Mellar was willing to hear it, as a compliment.
> 
> "Ah! As to that," said Mellar.
> 
> "Yes?" said Morrolan, who was, of course, quite curious as to how he had lost his book.
> 
> "This honor that you do to me does us both a good turn, as true honor always should," said Mellar.
> 
> "It does?" asked Morrolan.
> 
> "Indeed," Mellar confirmed.
> 
> "And yet I fail to see how that should be, I confess," said Morrolan.
> 
> "Well then, I shall enlighten you!" said Mellar, who seemed pleased by the chance to do another favor for the Dragon.
> 
> Morrolan inclined his head. "Please do."
> 
> "It is this," said Mellar. "Assume that instead of your current actions, you had requested of me that I provide some information on the unfortunate loss of this book whose return so pleases you."
> 
> "I will make that assumption," Morrolan said.
> 
> "Under this assumption," said Mellar, "we may also assume that I would respond to your request."
> 
> "Indeed we may," said Morrolan. "And what might we assume you would say?"
> 
> "Ah! Here is the problem," said Mellar. "For in this hypothetical situation, I would have to confess to you that I did not know anything of this matter. Then, we perceive, we would both be grieved, you by your disappointment and me by the circumstances which led me to have nothing but disappointing news!"
> 
> "Ah!" said Morrolan. "You are correct. It is well that I made no such request."
> 
> They stood for a moment contemplating this hypothetical disappointment, and we shall take this opportunity to describe the scene which has already progressed this far without any more setting than a low table on which was found a book. The astute reader has noticed that the room was stated to be a library, and has therefore undoubtedly filled in such details as shelves of books and chairs upon which perusers of these books could sit, and in this these readers are absolutely correct. Morrolan's library was large, well-lit, and provided with a number of comfortably upholstered chairs and sofas; in short, with the addition of a fine collection of books, which Morrolan not only possessed but had just that night augmented by one, it was a library as excellent as anyone could wish. Additionally, there were a number of tables scattered at various locations around the room, and on one of these nearby had been placed two glasses and a bottle of wine cooled in the Eastern manner. It was toward this that Morrolan moved now, relinquishing his contact with the book at last. He poured two glasses and offered one to Mellar, which Mellar accepted courteously, and sipped at his own glass while watching Mellar do likewise.
> 
> After a moment, Morrolan gestured toward the nearest sofa. "Perhaps you could alleviate this purely hypothetical disappointment of mine by sitting with me a while in other discussion?"
> 
> "I should be delighted to do so," Mellar said, and, choosing one side of the sofa, sat gracefully. Morrolan sat beside him on the sofa and turned slightly so that he was facing toward Mellar, although there was a chair pulled up already in a position from which its occupant could face an occupant of the sofa directly and so find conversation easy. Mellar sipped again from his wine and then placed the glass on yet another table beside this sofa. "However, my dear Lord Morrolan, I hope that you are not intending to discuss the contents of this book which I have been so happy to return to its rightful owner."
> 
> Morrolan said, "And if I do have this intention?"
> 
> "Then I shall have to disappoint you yet again, to my grief," said Mellar.
> 
> "You are unwilling to discuss this topic?" Morrolan asked.
> 
> "Unwilling! I should say not," said Mellar.
> 
> "You have confused me again," said Morrolan.
> 
> "For that I apologize," said Mellar.
> 
> "Accepted," said Morrolan, "but I hope you will be so kind as to enlighten me again."
> 
> "That hope I will not disappoint," said Mellar.
> 
> "I am pleased to hear it!" said Morrolan.
> 
> "I am pleased that you are pleased," said Mellar.
> 
> "Then you will enlighten me?" said Morrolan.
> 
> "This very instant," said Mellar, and did so: "You see, it is not a question of willingness."
> 
> "It is not?" said Morrolan.
> 
> "Not at all," said Mellar. "Why, I am willing to discourse on any number of topics with you, including this one."
> 
> "Then," asked Morrolan, "where lies this disappointment of which you spoke?"
> 
> Mellar sighed. "Simply this: any discourse which I am capable of giving on that subject will, of necessity, be brief and disappointing in its nature, for the reason that it will consist of me confessing my ignorance of the subject entirely."
> 
> "How," said Morrolan, "you are not familiar with the subject of this book which you brought to me?"
> 
> "That is it exactly," said Mellar.
> 
> "But then, it is doubly surprising that it should come to you and thence to me!" cried Morrolan.
> 
> "Not entirely," objected Mellar. "While it is certainly true that I know nothing of this subject in itself, there is something I know of its relation to other subjects."
> 
> "And what is that?" asked Morrolan.
> 
> "Why, I know that it is a subject which is of interest to you, Lord Morrolan," said Mellar.
> 
> Morrolan set down his own wine glass. "What, you have done this entirely based on the thought that I might like it, without knowing more than that?"
> 
> Mellar smiled. "Indeed," he confessed.
> 
> Morrolan was not a hesitant man. He had a thought and he acted on it; he reached out and stroked his fingers along the smile that Mellar was directing at him, much as he had stroked those fingers along the spine of his book. When Mellar offered confirmation of his thought through a deepening of that smile, Morrolan smiled himself. Placing both hands on Mellar's cheeks, he drew the Jhereg toward him until  
> 

 

Don't blame me -- that's where it ends, right there where you see it in the middle of the sentence. No, I don't know why. Perhaps the writer suddenly grew shy, or developed a sudden need for more privacy than could be provided in the Library, or even became bored with the subject and wandered off. Who knows? I don't, and I doubt you do either.

You're probably thinking that it sounds wildly unlike Morrolan to behave like that. I can't blame you, since I might think the same myself if I hadn't had some independent confirmation (or, since this bit of dramatization was brought to my attention later, it may be more correct to say that it confirmed what had already been presented to me) but, at any rate, the gist of those events was also conveyed to me by none other than Aliera.

After my own run-in with Mellar, the final one that was, you may recall, quite definitely final for Mellar and very nearly so for me, I wound up spending nearly a day in Castle Black recovering from Aliera's tender ministrations. During that time, I admired Morrolan's (or Teldra's) decorating scheme, worried more about Loiosh than I should have, and diligently avoided talking to Aliera about the reincarnation of souls, the sucking of souls into Great Weapons, or...or anything that involved souls in any way, honestly. Occasionally this required me to come up with other conversational topics at a desperate random, which produced some truly brilliant gems of elocution, I assure you. On one instance, I said:

"So, Aliera, I am still a little surprised that Morrolan was quite so willing to deal with a Jhereg." At her arched eyebrow, I clarified, "Other than yours truly, of course." It didn't affect her eyebrow at all, but it did seem to deflect her from family matters.

"You yourself said that this Mellar had researched Morrolan's habits thoroughly to be sure of this invitation," she reminded me.

"I did," I said. "Knowing that Mellar knew it and knowing it myself are different, though." She nodded and gave me a slight smile to acknowledge that point. "And you are his cousin and spend a great deal more time with him than I do. I thought you might have some light to shed."

"I suspect you know more about my cousin than you think," Aliera said. She seemed amused by some private thought as she looked at me. "Then again," she said, "perhaps not."

"I trust you're going to explain that," I said, with some justifiable irritation. I hadn't been having the best of weeks -- not that Aliera's had been appreciably better, of course, but it's difficult to be fair toward people who are being smug at you.

"You're not usually so trusting, Vlad," she said. I scowled. She was definitely amused now. "Well, there was the book."

"Morrolan has a lot of books," I said.

"He was polite at dinner."

"You said he was dull," I reminded her.

"Dull is not always a drawback, paired with a certain type of handsome face," Aliera said.

I blinked. "Morrolan thought he was handsome?" She smirked broadly at me. Well, I was glad someone's afternoon was looking up. Mine was currently topsy-turvy. "I suppose he wasn't bad," I admitted, "for a Dragaeran, anyway."

"He wasn't bad at all," Aliera said, "for a Jhereg, anyway. He had the sort of mouth my cousin seems to like."

I had a sudden image of why Morrolan might like a certain type of mouth, and shuddered. The image didn't go away. I confess, it did occur to me to wonder just why Aliera was volunteering this sort of personal information about her cousin to me, but I assumed that it was a sort of revenge; she did, after all, have certain reasons to be quite irritated with him right now, little things having to do with the honor of all of the Dragon house and a Morganti dagger in the stomach, among others. I wasn't much concerned with the honor of all of the Dragon house, but I could certainly wince in sympathy over the Morganti dagger in the stomach and then firmly turn away from any further thoughts on the matter, so I was perfectly happy assuming that this chattiness was about Aliera's feelings toward her cousin and nothing to actually do with me. That just goes to show, of course, how wrong I tend to be in matters like this, since in retrospect Aliera was clearly encouraging -- well, matters that eventually did take their course with a certain amount of assistance from Aliera and others, but didn't have anything to do with Mellar, so I'll gloss over them here and get back to my conversation with Aliera.

Quite unaffected by my reaction, Aliera was continuing, with some relish, "They did retire to Morrolan's study after dinner to, er, 'discuss the book'. For over an hour. I rather doubt that a Jhereg had an hour's worth of discussion on pre-Empire sorcery in him." She eyed me -- a Jhereg baronet -- speculatively and opened her mouth, but this was veering back into territory that I was determined to avoid, so I said:

"And you think they were, er?"

She snorted. "Of course they were. That Jhereg was undoubtedly down on his knees--" She seemed to realize that this was going too far and stopped. "I'm sorry, Vlad."

I didn't particularly think that I was the one to whom she ought to be apologizing, but I appreciated it nonetheless, as I now had the complete mental image before me that I had been trying to banish earlier and it was making me distinctly uncomfortable. At the time I thought that I was uncomfortable because Morrolan was my employer and therefore not someone I ought to be picturing lounging at his ease in his private library while getting fellated by a man I'd just killed. A man I'd just killed with Morrolan's full approval, at that. It was enough to put a man temporarily off libraries. I also thought that Aliera was sorry for speaking rudely of her cousin and not for my discomfort with it. As I said, I do have a tendency to get these things wrong. Still, I waved one hand graciously and forgave her on the condition that the subject change immediately, which I encouraged by changing it myself. I don't remember precisely what I said that time, but I think it was actually as vapid in retrospect as it seemed at the time, which is a relief.

It's true that neither of these things were in themselves conclusive, and even taken together they were not much more than suggestive. I decided to believe them anyway, and I took to looking at Morrolan in a different light after that. And that, I think, shows that I'm not always wrong, which is also a relief.

Of course, from this vantage point I have a certain advantage, it's true. My advantage is this: I've actually asked Morrolan himself -- who is, after all, the only person left living who knows, and I'm sure Mellar would have a number of other things to say to me should I ever happen to meet him on the Paths of the Dead, which is something I'm quite eager to avoid -- and he's told me that it's true. So there's that, and perhaps I should have told you earlier, but it was more fun this way. That conversation was quite simple after all the speculation.

"Morrolan," I said, "did you do this with Mellar?"

"Yes, more or less," he said.

So from that you can see that our unknown romance writer, Aliera, and my overactive imagination were correct after all, and you can also see something of the current state of the relationship between me and Morrolan. So that was that, and I suppose I could have left it there, but I was somewhat curious, and as you're still reading you would seem to be curious as well.

We weren't in the library at Castle Black, which would have been a bit much. We were, in fact, sprawled across an obscenely large bed entirely elsewhere, and my legs were specifically sprawled out to either side of Morrolan's torso. Morrolan was running his mouth lazily along my thighs and my cock in between conversational moments.

"More or less?" I said. I had one arm behind my head, propping it up so that I could see Morrolan framed between my knees. He made an attractive picture.

Morrolan looked up at me. "Is there a particular reason that you're asking this now?" he said.

"No," I admitted.

"Hmm," Morrolan said. He shrugged and rubbed my left hip with one hand, which felt good. "I used his mouth, but I didn't let him use mine," he told me.

"Hmm," I said back at him. "Is that how you see it? As using someone's mouth?"

He looked startled, and then understanding, and then thoughtful. Then he looked down and did a thing with his tongue that I hoped was helping him to think, because I was growing quite distracted from intellectual matters. After a few moments he looked back up at me and said, "That may not have been the best way of expressing the technicalities of the situation."

"Okay," I said. I wasn't particularly worried about it; I'd had, by that point, any number of reassurances as to Morrolan's intentions toward me (and on mine toward Morrolan, which it's always nice to have clarified in one's own mind, although I could have done without some of the circumstances in which those reassurances occurred, as -- for example -- one of the more relaxing ones came while being thrown out of Dzur Mountain by Sethra herself, which was a misunderstanding but not a pleasant one, you understand). I thought back to my original question. "Before or after you realized that he was trying to start another Dragon-Jhereg war?"

"Before," he said, "and also after, with a slight difference in emphasis." He smiled, or possibly bared his teeth. "Any other questions?"

I shook my head no. I found that I was comfortable now imagining the rest for myself: Morrolan leaning back in one of his overstuffed leather sofas, breathing in deep deliberate motions, none of Morrolan's own pale skin visible between his solid black clothing and the Jhereg black and silver and ordinary brown hair of the man kneeling in front of him. Mellar was a mutt, a crossbreed of houses with nowhere to go but the Jhereg, the shore where all of Dragaera's dirty flotsam washed up eventually; he had that in common with Easterners like me. Really, the overidentification was inevitable. My hair was also brown, but at least it was shorter than Mellar's had been.

It was interesting to think about how "after" might have gone. Morrolan was a gentleman through and through, so he would have felt honor-bound to be courteous as a lover -- or would he? I tried to remember what I could of what I'd heard of Dragons and honor in bed (or on library sofas), but nothing in particular came to mind. Maybe he hadn't been. Maybe he'd grabbed Mellar's head and -- well, I'm sure Mellar would still have had the upper hand, given that Morrolan was oath-bound to avoid hurting him. Mellar had probably laughed. I hoped that Morrolan had choked the bastard, and the throb of pleasure I felt right then was only partially due to the motion of Morrolan's mouth on my skin. Briefly I even thought of grabbing the back of Morrolan's head just to bring my little fantasy closer to the surface, but I discarded that idea before it even fully formed. To begin with, I, unlike Mellar, was not protected by any oath of Morrolan's. I doubted he'd do anything particularly permanent to me, but there wasn't any percentage in trading present blinding pleasure for temporary screaming agony. More importantly -- or, considering Morrolan's skill at and propensity for (honorable) violence, at least equally importantly -- I just didn't want to do that to Morrolan. It would be rude.

Besides, it wasn't as though grinding myself against Morrolan's mouth would noticeably improve my experience. He's just that good, honestly. It would be like jogging the elbow of an Eastern witch halfway through the spell.

It's tempting, actually, to leave you here in the narrative and announce "the end", but you've already been teased that way twice, haven't you? And clearly this is a subject of interest to you, as you've kept reading to this point when it's quite clear what's going on. Well, this is hardly the time to turn shy on you. If you really want to know, I don't mind. It stops being especially relevant to the story at hand, though, because after deciding that I didn't really want to do something stupid, i.e., act out something Morrolan might or might not have even done with some other man, I stopped thinking about Mellar. Really, I had plenty of other things to think about at the time.

Morrolan drew back far enough to run his tongue over the crown of my cock and then pushed down until I was completely inside of his mouth again. Up and tongue, down and suck. I can describe the motions to you, but there's no good way to communicate the exquisite sensations. I can describe how I reacted, how I moaned with every breath and rubbed the flat palms of my hands across the smooth surface of the sheets on the bed, how much difficulty I had in keeping my hips still even though I knew intellectually that moving would disrupt the rhythm that Morrolan was using to such good effect, or how my eyes rolled back in my head and my toes curled up until I felt like I was turning inside-out, but that makes me sound coherent, and coherent is definitely something I was not. All of this is a reconstruction after the fact; at the time, I was basically concerned entirely with finding some way to make sure that Morrolan understood that I desperately wanted him to keep doing that, yes that, yes yes yes exactly that, yes yes yes yesyesyesyesyesyesyes and so on.

He did understand, of course, and kept doing exactly that until I reached my climax right there in his mouth. Then he did it a little more, somewhat slower, and then he stopped and simply sprawled across the bed looking justifiably smug for a while that I spent remembering how to breathe and what a nice thing air was, almost as nice as Morrolan. After that we talked about other things, switched places, and gave me something to be smug about although Morrolan insisted on complaining about whisker burn. The subject of Mellar didn't come up again, and it hasn't since, either.

And that's all I know about Morrolan and Mellar, or Leareth as some called him, so I will end things here. I hope this was helpful to you.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted for the Valabar's fic exchange in 2006 for imadra_blue, although I'm afraid that I don't have a record of my prompt.


End file.
